Posted on DU: April 26, 2011
By DU Member: Generic Other
Views on DU: 1054

In my opinion, the question that Serrano's work asks so provocatively: If you take cheap ordinary plastic to make a religious icon, have you imbued that icon with divine power? Or is it cheap ordinary plastic as it was before being pressed into a mold in China by heathens (one who has never heard of Christ).

Furthermore, the icon floating in the human waste questions whether humans and their byproducts are made divine by some sort of transubstantiation like the way bread and wine can under some ritual can become the sacred body and blood of Christ.

Understand what one is being offended by. Because in Serrano's view, the piss is no less defiling than any other of HIS creations. Christ himself washed the feet of a PROSTITUTE. The king touched his subjects to cure scrofula. An age-old question that is philosophically worthy of discussion but has been reduced to being explained as the artist trying to be offensive.

In actuality his exploration of the conflict between the sacred and profane may have created something holy and beautiful comparable to the communion itself.

To attack and destroy it is tantamount to attacking an icon of Christ. It is a holy relic and one of Christ's own followers symbolically crucified him again. If the image exibited stigmata as a result of being punctured by an icepick, it would be enshrined and examined as a miracle by the church. All this passion around the Easter holiday. The fundie art vandals became a part of the art when they attacked it. And they also destroyed the image of their own god.

religious fanaticism is always bizarre.you know if the piss were thought to be that of christ then a church would be built around it as the most holy relic (next to the thirteen european churches that claim to house the foreskin of christ) .

...that some of the same folks who cluck away about Muslims rioting over cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, curiously see no irony in their own outrage over things like Serrano's Piss Christ or Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (where an image of the Virgin Mary was created using elephant dung).

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